Country Music 101 at Nashville Hall of Fame and Museum

“A song ain’t nothin’ in the world but a story just wrote with music to it,” said Hank Williams. Just not everyone can tell the painful stories nor can they string them together with rhythm and harmony as has Williams or the hundreds of other country music icons that are featured at the Nashville Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Nashville didn’t become the country music capital overnight. Nor, is it an island to the country music star power. A trip to the Nashville museum will give visitors a nice primer into how the music industry evolved, who helped to popularize this genre of music, and let you peek into some of the country legends’ personal lives. A bit of Wikipedia, mixed with Country Music Awards and Star magazine in 3-D. The exhibits will also help provide the Nashville tourist with a broad overview as to how this city became the capital of country music.

The path to fame for country legends began a hundred years ago. Certainly, the influence of the Black music in the south helped to create the sound for the next century. Fiddles and five-string banjos played at African-American church revivals, and vocals full of harmony and gospel soul, left their mark on today’s country sound.

What is commonly known as country music left the rural heartlands in the 1920s. By 1923, WBAP Radio in Fort Worth began broadcasting “barn dances,” which were basically country music hours. In 1939, the tobacco maker RJR began to sponsor a 30-minute opry show on NBC’s radio network.

World War II dispersed Americans, and as our young men left their homes, they took their favorite music with them, spreading its popularity beyond the original country sphere.

In 1946 the first commercial recording in Nashville began at the Tulane Hotel. A live weekly radio broadcast started the next year, and by 1955 Nashville had its first recording studio on what would become known as Music Row.

By 1969, the ever popular Hee Haw and Johnny Cash TV shows were broadcast across the country. Just 11 years later, John Travolta left his sparkly white disco dancing suit and donned a more rustic pair of boots and cowboy hat for the blockbuster “Urban Cowboy.”

While many may think that today’s radio dials are dominated by urban music, in 2010 Taylor Swift had sold 25 million digital tracks, making her the musician with the most digital downloads, ever. Interestingly, she edited her music video from an Apple iBook and said, “It cost like $5.00 to make.” And, according to The Tennessean, country music fans lag their counterparts in digital downloads. When Swift released Speak Now, 1 million copies sold immediately, “raising the statistical musical fortunes of an entire industry,” stated the Nashville daily newspaper.

Beyond the business of country music, exhibits also touch upon the personal, from the opulent to the ragged. The Country Music Museum displays Elvis’ gold car as well as the first anniversary present that Priscilla gave him: a 24-karat gold leaf grand piano.

There are plenty of costumes on display, so you can see what Taylor, Miranda or Reba have worn. Perhaps the flashiest of all are from the Nudie collection. This doesn’t mean singers performing in the nude, rather, styles designed by a Ukrainian immigrant by the name of Nudie Cohn. Back in the 1930s he dressed up burlesque performers in New York City. After moving to Hollywood he got a lucky break. In 1947, Tex Williams commissioned him to design ten costumes. From there, his signature styles became the craze.

Country music has always been a bit over the top. While mostly uneducated and untrained, many of the performers had a canny sense of marketing that helped to sell their songs. Country music DJ and TV host, Ralph Emery, said of Dolly Parton, “She has the brains of a computer, the heart of an artist and the spirit of a minister.”

Country Music Hall of Famer Don Gibson wrote “Oh Lonesome Me” and “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” on the same day while Jimmy Davis became the governor of Louisiana. Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had 1,500 songs recorded by more than 400 artists amounting to sales of more than 250 million records. That’s nothing to “hee-haw” about.